diff --git a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
index e9f417336c9..79652208338 100644
--- a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
@@ -515,6 +515,9 @@ Release 2.1.0-beta - 2013-07-02
     HADOOP-9264. Port change to use Java untar API on Windows from 
     branch-1-win to trunk. (Chris Nauroth via suresh)
 
+    HADOOP-9678. TestRPC#testStopsAllThreads intermittently fails on Windows.
+    (Ivan Mitic via cnauroth)
+
     HADOOP-9665. Fixed BlockDecompressorStream#decompress to return -1 rather
     than throw EOF at end of file. (Zhijie Shen via acmurthy)
 
diff --git a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/test/java/org/apache/hadoop/ipc/TestRPC.java b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/test/java/org/apache/hadoop/ipc/TestRPC.java
index a4e915a30a3..50c91c1ab40 100644
--- a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/test/java/org/apache/hadoop/ipc/TestRPC.java
+++ b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/test/java/org/apache/hadoop/ipc/TestRPC.java
@@ -781,7 +781,17 @@ public void testStopsAllThreads() throws Exception {
         .setNumHandlers(5).setVerbose(true).build();
     server.start();
     try {
-      int threadsRunning = countThreads("Server$Listener$Reader");
+      // Wait for at least one reader thread to start
+      int threadsRunning = 0;
+      long totalSleepTime = 0;
+      do {
+        totalSleepTime += 10;
+        Thread.sleep(10);
+        threadsRunning = countThreads("Server$Listener$Reader");
+      } while (threadsRunning == 0 && totalSleepTime < 5000);
+
+      // Validate that at least one thread started (we didn't timeout)
+      threadsRunning = countThreads("Server$Listener$Reader");
       assertTrue(threadsRunning > 0);
     } finally {
       server.stop();